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Railway Cuts


0bserver

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Interesting piece on NPM by Gawne with Chris Thomas, Daphne Caine, and Charles Guard.

https://www.manxradio.com/radioplayer/od/items/perspective-20th-november/

Why Thomas doesn't just come clean and tell the trainspotters that there is no money is beyond me. 

The suggestion to cut the railways back to Castletown and Laxey is a good one. 

Charles Guard, if you care so much about heritage then you pay for it all and stop expecting tax payer's to fund your hobbies. 

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6 hours ago, 0bserver said:

Why Thomas doesn't just come clean and tell the trainspotters that there is no money is beyond me. 

He knows as well as you do that if he said that he would be out on his arse at the next election. Ann Corlett received more votes than he did at the last one. In Manx Politics there can be no bigger gypsy's warning than that (except Chris Robertshaw scraping in with less than ten votes over Jono Joughin in Douglas East).

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We really aren't allowed nice things anymore, are we?

There seems to be money for grandiose schemes in Douglas and Liverpool, but not for the maintenance of what we were left by the people with vision and craftmanship that came before us.

Meanwhile, their plan to homogenise the island in CCP approved granite slabs continues apace. Comrade Thomas is being sent in to pacify Peel.

Edit - it's amazing how these things were kept going when the island was skint in the early eighties.

Edited by Hoops
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26 minutes ago, Hoops said:

We really aren't allowed nice things anymore, are we?

There seems to be money for grandiose schemes in Douglas and Liverpool, but not for the maintenance of what we were left by the people with vision and craftmanship that came before us.

Meanwhile, their plan to homogenise the island in CCP approved granite slabs continues apace. Comrade Thomas is being sent in to pacify Peel.

Edit - it's amazing how these things were kept going when the island was skint in the early eighties.

If IOMG kept on top of maintenance and took care of infrastructure instead of letting it go to ruin, then maybe it wouldn’t cost mega millions to replace, which in turn causes uproar. Schemes like Peel are nice to have but aren’t essential and are certainly are not going to improve Peel economy. 
 

Edited by 2112
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9 hours ago, 0bserver said:

Interesting piece on NPM by Gawne with Chris Thomas, Daphne Caine, and Charles Guard.

https://www.manxradio.com/radioplayer/od/items/perspective-20th-november/

Why Thomas doesn't just come clean and tell the trainspotters that there is no money is beyond me. 

The suggestion to cut the railways back to Castletown and Laxey is a good one. 

Charles Guard, if you care so much about heritage then you pay for it all and stop expecting tax payer's to fund your hobbies. 

Except he didn’t really say that. What he did infer was that if things got really desperate with Government finances the partial closure of the railways is the sort of thing they’d have to look at. Probably alongside lots of other none critical expenditure (and there’s a lot of that).

He’d also do well to look at history. The Steam and Electric railways have both operated in shortened forms in the past and the results were not clever. Big reductions in passengers and revenue and not much reduction in costs. In typical IOMG fashion, the fixed costs are huge. Layers of managers, supervisors, engineers, that didn’t exist in the days when the railways were carrying 20 times more people than they are today, and operating all year round.

The ‘capital’ programme also needs looking at. There are (or at least were) several million in the budget each year for track relays. Many of you will have seen this going on between Groudle and the Liverpool Arms over recent Winters. People who work on the railways will tell you this is not essential work, but nice to have. 

The problem is, that CT will be getting bamboozled by his officers, as always desperate to protect their fiefdoms. Some outside advice, on different ways of working, and not being given by people with vested interests, would seem like a sensible starting point.

 

 

 

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2 minutes ago, Nellie said:

Except he didn’t really say that. What he did infer was that if things got really desperate with Government finances the partial closure of the railways is the sort of thing they’d have to look at. Probably alongside lots of other none critical expenditure (and there’s a lot of that).

He’d also do well to look at history. The Steam and Electric railways have both operated in shortened forms in the past and the results were not clever. Big reductions in passengers and revenue and not much reduction in costs. In typical IOMG fashion, the fixed costs are huge. Layers of managers, supervisors, engineers, that didn’t exist in the days when the railways were carrying 20 times more people than they are today, and operating all year round.

The ‘capital’ programme also needs looking at. There are (or at least were) several million in the budget each year for track relays. Many of you will have seen this going on between Groudle and the Liverpool Arms over recent Winters. People who work on the railways will tell you this is not essential work, but nice to have. 

The problem is, that CT will be getting bamboozled by his officers, as always desperate to protect their fiefdoms. Some outside advice, on different ways of working, and not being given by people with vested interests, would seem like a sensible starting point.

 

 

 

Away with your nonsense - facts have no place on this forum...

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7 minutes ago, Nellie said:

Except he didn’t really say that. What he did infer was that if things got really desperate with Government finances the partial closure of the railways is the sort of thing they’d have to look at. Probably alongside lots of other none critical expenditure (and there’s a lot of that).

He’d also do well to look at history. The Steam and Electric railways have both operated in shortened forms in the past and the results were not clever. Big reductions in passengers and revenue and not much reduction in costs. In typical IOMG fashion, the fixed costs are huge. Layers of managers, supervisors, engineers, that didn’t exist in the days when the railways were carrying 20 times more people than they are today, and operating all year round.

The ‘capital’ programme also needs looking at. There are (or at least were) several million in the budget each year for track relays. Many of you will have seen this going on between Groudle and the Liverpool Arms over recent Winters. People who work on the railways will tell you this is not essential work, but nice to have. 

The problem is, that CT will be getting bamboozled by his officers, as always desperate to protect their fiefdoms. Some outside advice, on different ways of working, and not being given by people with vested interests, would seem like a sensible starting point.

 

 

 

That is what I heard also. In fact, what he did say was that it may be in contingency plans for a disaster scenario, implying to me that it was in done else's,  probably Treasury's, contingency plans not DOI's. 

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3 hours ago, Lightening McQueen said:

Converting the tram line between Ramsey and Laxey into a cycle/footpath seems like a good idea to me!

Yup.  Riding up 'Rest and be thankful' is a bitch. 

Although based on their recent attempts at cycle lanes (Pulrose bridge, Fishers Hill to Gansey and Ballasalla new roundabout) god knows what they would do.  

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